FACING THE PAIN

I hate feeling stupid. I guess nobody likes feeling stupid. I hate it. When I feel stupid I usually make things worse by telling myself just how stupid I am. I think that might also be the reason why I don't want to face the attic. Everything up there that needs to go is basically a wrong decision. It should have been tossed months or actually years ago but I parked it up there. So every time I threw something out I have to admit I made a stupid decision back then.

I have come to terms with it in as much as the stupid decision was made whether or not I deal with it now. The only thing to make it worse is to postpone dealing with it even more. I have decided I am strong enough to face it now. Actually I decided that about 3 weeks ago and it took until now to actually do it. I picked out a few random things that were thrown into the trash I have upstairs and hauled down 2 boxes full of VHS tapes. Yes. VHS tapes. Next destination. Trash.

MY DAILY BATTLE

How on earth am I to declutter if just half a day of not keeping up on daily chores makes my house look as if it blew up and I haven't done a thing in  3 weeks? It is so frustrating. I really am struggling with this. I used to start upstairs in our bedroom, but then, when we switched rooms with the girls I never really was able to keep it up. I know I have whined about this before. I have finally decided to completely turn things around and just start downstairs. Since the cleaning lady started things have been more under control down here and I think it is the only way to go. Wish me luck and asked me how it went in July.

SMALL VICTORIES

I finally managed to get the Easter stuff back into the attic. As I was up there I started looking through things. And I started throwing things away. Thing I would have kept for sure or lets face it, things I kept and never thought about throwing away like zip lock bags that could be reused and all kind of other things. Today, I simply threw them out. They were dusty. They probably made it into the house as packaging but for sure they could be useful some other time. Well. Seems like this other time never came and today they left the house. I filled up a tiny bag of trash. Found more stuff to donate. Once I realized I was churning more and more I simply stopped, gathered my trash and went back downstairs.

It felt good. I parted with stuff, it wasn't hard. I realized when my "throwing away energy" was used up and made sure I woulds not get frustrated and simply stopped. And then I focused on the things achieved in that time and not on feelings of failure for not doing "more" or for not having an organized approach to this.

As you see I have come along way. And I will go even further!

ROTM - MAY

Room of the month for MAY will be the kitchen. And yup. It's done. Cupboards emptied, cleaned, reorganized. Declutterd. Yes, no worries. To be honest. There was not much clutter and I pride myself in still having shelves that are basically empty. I might still be working on the January and February rooms, but I believe I just earned myself  2 extra weeks for those!

How on earth did I pull this one off you wonder? Well, 2 days of hard work and some cleaning fairy magic of course!

ROTM - APRIL

I almost forgot about the room of the month! YIKES! But I remembered in time and decided to take the easiest room to keep the stress at bay. Easiest at the moment was upstairs bathroom. I did a quick declutter and cleaning of the cabinet, looked at the the bottles standing around to see if any where empty and left the deep clean to the cleaning fairy. Voila. DONE!

Editors note: I never posted this!